APAuburn coach Gene Chizik holds the trophy as defensive end Nick Fairley stands next to him after Auburn defeated Oregon 22-19 in the BCS championship football game Monday in Glendale, Ariz.

Syracuse, N.Y. -- Having been to Auburn, Ala., where so many of the girls (and guys, too) dress up for the games . . . where the words “War Eagle” are uttered more than “good morning” on Saturdays (and this, in a town in which manners greatly matter) . . . where Toomer’s Corner gets regularly swaddled in toilet paper (and, oh, my kingdom in exchange for the position of “TP” salesman down that way) . . . I understand that the happiest man along the Alabama-Georgia border is Jay Jacobs.

Nah, Jacobs beams on this day because one of the craziest hires -- seemingly, anyway -- paid off out there in Arizona. And the man can finally exhale.

Jacobs? He’s the Auburn athletic director who hired Gene Chizik out of Iowa State 25 months ago . . . and then listened as his curious decision was hooted by so many followers, including as prominent as any -- Charles Barkley, the Turner Gill advocate who used to do his eating, yapping and rebounding in his younger days for the Tigers.

Chizik, after all, had been a head coach for only two years, both at Iowa State (wherever that was). And in those two years, he’d led the Cyclones to records of 3-9 and 2-10. Worse, Iowa State’s Big 12 Conference record under Chizik had been 2-14.

And yet, Chizik was in, Tommy Tuberville was out . . . and so much of the Auburn football world was agog. And not in a good way. That the Tigers went "only" 8-5 last season, Chizik's first on the Auburn bridge, did not make matters any less dicey.

(Editor's note: While 8-5 will get a lot of free meals for Doug Marrone around here, that kind of record produces only an arc between shrugged shoulders and curled lips down there were Bo Jackson once thundered.)

“I know,” said Jacobs upon introducing Chizik to Tigers fans back in December of 2008, “that we have found the right fit for Auburn.”

How he could possibly have known that, gazing upon those ghastly Iowa State numbers, remains something of a mystery. But Jacobs did choose wisely and at this moment, two days shy of two years on the button, he has been made to look like an oracle.

Gene Chizik has delivered as almost nobody would have dared imagine after he’d arrived from Iowa (again, wherever that may be). And that fully acknowledges, of course, that one of his first orders of business -- the romancing of Cam Newton, though weighed down with baggage (and with more to be piled on) -- wasn’t a bad way to start.

As such, Toomer’s Corner, at the papered intersection of College Street and Magnolia Avenue, is a happy mess. Again. And Jay Jacobs, praying like everybody else to whom “War Eagle” inspires bended knees that Cam will prove to have been forever clean, smiles more broadly than anyone.

Exoneration is a beautiful thing.

(Bud Poliquin's freshly-written on-line commentaries, his columns and his "To The Point" observations appear virtually every day on syracuse.com. His work can also be regularly found on the pages of The Post-Standard newspaper. Additionally, he can be heard Mondays through Fridays (10 a.m.-12 noon), on the "Bud & the Manchild" sports-talk radio show on The Score 1260-AM. E-mail: bpoliquin@syracuse.com.)